


The Constable's House

by Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas)



Series: The Doctrine of Signatures [2]
Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 13:29:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9659444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackie_Thomas/pseuds/Jackie%20Thomas
Summary: And there is the house, which bears witness, waking from its decades of sleep, seeming to say, ‘I know how this goes’.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This follows on from my story, the Doctrine of Signatures taking place two or three years later. I think it just about stands alone if you haven’t read the original.

James drives us straight to the house from the hospital. He doesn’t speak, keeps his gaze determinedly on the road and Radio Four murmuring over the silence. The clouds ahead are low and heavy with snow and Monty, in his basket, is keeping up an outraged protest from the back seat. I keep telling the man I’m fine but I might as well save my breath. The night in hospital was a precaution. A few cuts and bruises might make me look like a tragic pensioner, but they will soon heal.

Obviously, he thinks it is his fault. Apparently, he should have ‘risk assessed’ more thoroughly before ‘letting’ me go and interview this particular witness alone. It seems to have escaped his notice that I am the senior officer. And what’s more, I won. The witness is now, very much, nicked.

But he is thinking I am an old fool who can no longer defend himself against a determined thug. He thinks I should bloody well pack it in before I do myself some real damage. Or at least, this is how the argument we are not having is going.

**~**

Daylight is fading by the time we negotiate the twist of pathway up to the house. They still call it the Constable’s House in the village, but this night, trimmed with powdery white, it shows its secret heart as the witch’s cottage, the wizard’s lair. 

We were due to be here tomorrow, anyway. It is our housewarming and late Christmas, our New Year, our week off. We are expecting guests at the weekend. Lyn and the family, Laura and her partner, his sister, Nell. DI Smith will be here too, with a couple of cousins who knew the place as children. It will have been a long time since the house has seen a gathering of this size. 

**~**

Taking apart was the first step in rebuilding. Like archaeology, like time travel, the decay of the twenty-first century gave way to the accumulations of the twentieth and exposed the nineteenth; layers of varnish and wallpaper, mouse-digested skirting board, geological strata of soot.

We have a mantelpiece display of our finds. Victorian domestic detritus, glass timeworn into emerald, an assortment of pipe smoking paraphernalia, a notebook of closely written pages, of spells or shopping lists.

We were taking up the floorboards in the round room upstairs, the one James is calling the tower room and filling with books, when we found, wrapped in oilcloth, a carved rosewood box. Older than the house; an eighteenth-century gentleman’s writing box. 

We gave it back to DI Smith. It turned out to be a long-lost family heirloom, probably hidden by Sidney in his years of confusion before his death, and the source of yet another family feud of his parent’s generation. Smith said we should keep the contents of the box for the collection. Two faded warrant cards, the workings of a fob watch, some pound notes the size of paperbacks, letters from Ivor’s father at sea, a newspaper cutting reporting on the coronation of Edward V11 and a handful of tarnished rings and cufflinks.

**~**

While James sees to heat, power and water I release Monty to sulk under a cupboard. I consider unpacking the car, feeding the cat and all the other tasks I could usefully complete. I dismiss each as impossible.

James is already making up the bed by the time I have negotiated the bathroom. I am hindered by my various injuries but I tell him I don’t need any help thanks very much, and he replies with a huff of impatience.

**~**

When I wake, hours later, the room is in darkness. It is quiet; even more so than usual. No shivering tree branches, no animal calls or scratches. It is a silence from the depths of a snow drift.

He is next to me in the bed. I can hear the dispute of his dream, its timbre and tenor. I reach out carefully into the dark and find his book, a pair of reading glasses, precariously discarded and then I find him, curled beside me into a question mark.

I have woken next to him before. This man, my not-lover. Who bought half a derelict house because I asked him to, who let his hands harden to the labour of rebuilding it, who learnt the poetry of planning regulations and turned his brilliance to questions of insulation and underfloor heating. He slept beside me when this was the only habitable room, when this was the only bed, when...

He shifts as he wakes and I hear the switch of the bedside lamp. 

“Power’s out,” he says. 

His lighter sparks, and candlelight makes a round star in the darkness, lighting him across the room. He has put a glass of water on the bedside table with my painkillers and he helps me sit up so I can take a tablet. When I put the glass aside, he is still there, warm and slow from sleep, I sense his closeness, taste the dark coffee and toothpaste of his breath. I whisper the prayer of his name. He sighs and gathers me in. 

**~**

A luminous morning. I can hear James about the house, coming in through the kitchen door, stamping snow from his boots. I try to remember. Did I fall asleep, like a child, in his arms?

In our renovation, we resisted, as far as we could, upsetting the puzzle box logic of the house’s geography. Leaving the resident ghosts to walk their familiar pathways undisturbed. We succumbed only once to the pull of clarity, by opening out the kitchen and making a single room for most of our living. There is a table which will, with a little encouragement, accommodate all our guests for dinner. There are armchairs around the fireplace, rugs from Morse’s house, art inherited from some ancient Hathaway. There are doors that will open to the garden, once the weather allows.

Outside the snow is still falling thickly but the power is back on and a sturdy fire cracks and snaps in the fireplace. Monty, ever the pragmatist, has forgiven us and found himself the best hearthside spot. James, in socked feet, is beside him, pondering the artefact collection. He has spotted something is missing, detective to the last despite himself. I wonder if he has worked out what.

“I got the generator going,” he says turning.

“So I see.”

He is lean and strong in jeans and sweatshirt. I envy him. Not his youth. Not exactly. But I wish I could be a few years closer to him in age. I catch myself with this thought and the tapestry of need and want and doubt woven into it. I try not to despair of myself. 

“How are you?”

“I expect I’ll live.”

“The car’s disappeared,” he says, as if it has been spirited away by faerie folk. 

We have prepared, of course. We have the supplies we brought with us and enough tuna, spaghetti and crates of pale ale to see us through an apocalypse or two. But he throws me an anxious glance, no doubt regretting yesterday’s headlong drive into the wilderness.

This house is yards from a busy road. It is in easy reach of Oxford and several other towns. It has an address and a postcode, it pays its taxes and its bills. So it makes no sense that it behaves in relation to the rest of the world as if it has been built on the remotest corner of the emptiest continent. It appears on no map, it is a mystery to the satnav, a rare hesitation in the authoritative voice of the machine. A mythical isle, James has decided; drifting in and out of reality. 

We have planted signs at our turn-off which no one sees and eventually disappear. We have given up trying to get rubbish collected or anything delivered. Postmen across three centuries could never find the house and, by long tradition, mail is left at the village post office or, more often, vanishes. When we are expecting someone, we usually have to send James to stand at the bottom of the hill, waiting like a moody spectre, to flag down circling roofers or plumbers. We can’t ask them to phone ahead because when the house goes missing, the signal does too.

I think we have made this happen. If some large and lively family had taken over the Constable’s House. If there were parties to be thrown and holidays to be taken, it would have established its place in the physical world, flown its pennant from the turrets, lifted its veil. But we, like Sidney and Ivor, have made the forest close in around us.

**~**

We get through breakfast with only the sighing complaints of the coffee percolator for conversation. We are both advanced experts in avoidance strategies, we could keep this up for days, but I can always tell when he is working up to a sentence. He stacks the dishes to put it off for a few minutes and then considers me critically.

“I can help you wash,” he says and blushes.

“I’m not helpless,” I snap at him.

In all honesty, I would love to be rid of the grim remnants of the fight and the night in hospital, but the task, even two days later, feels well beyond me. The tablets have only muted my various aches and pains, I have one functioning hand, a wrenched shoulder and decorated as I am with so many bandages and dressings, I am a walking flag of surrender.

Admitting surrender is equally beyond me but I see another speech brewing. 

“I’m aware you’re not helpless,” he says. “You’re stronger than me, you always have been. You saved my life and I’m not talking about burning buildings; you keep saving my life. So why can’t you let me do one thing for you?” 

He gives me his arm and I’m so astonished I let him help me up.

“It’ll be fine,” he tells me, back to deadpan. “It won’t be weird.”

“Are you sure about that, sergeant?”

“No sir, not in the least.”

There was a month a couple of summers ago, when the house had no roof, no windows, no doors. Inside, the walls had been stripped of plaster, the floorboards taken up, its wiring and plumbing removed. It was a shell, a skeleton, propped up by scaffolding and open to the air. I know how Smith’s old house must have felt during that time. A broken ruin, without defences, waiting to be restored with this most tender care. 

I sit draped in towels on the bathroom chair while he washes my hair. I close my eyes as he massages shampoo with wary fingers. He washes my face with a flannel, an arm, another arm, careful around the bruises, bypassing the dressings, chest, back, leg, another leg, thorough, a piece of evidence inspected for clues, gentle, so gentle, like being held by him again.

When he is finished and I open my eyes, I find him on one knee before me, head bowed. He could be waiting for benediction. I rest my hand on his head, lift his face.

“And you saved my life,” I say. “And you keep saving my life.”

He disappears swiftly and when he returns with my clothes, he has recovered himself. He forgets then that I am not helpless, I can still dress myself and I let him take this over for me too. 

**~**

I find him sprawled in front of the fire, Monty restlessly scaling his rangy heights. He has been upstairs getting the rooms ready for the guests who might or might not breach our house’s defences in a day or two, but now he is reading. I sit in the chair he is leaning against and lay my hand on his shoulder. He reaches back to cover it with his own.

I had thought of the ring we found among the odds and ends in the writing box as something of the house, like the apples from the trees, like the mossy roof tile he uses for a paperweight. But once I had given it to a jeweller and she made it gleam, I saw how, as a gift, it could be construed.

The ring is eighteen carat gold and was made in the early years of the twentieth century. I offered it back to the family when I learned its value, but DI Smith said he was sure his Great Uncle would have preferred us to have it. 

James’ book is on woodland management and he gives me the highlights of our next project. When winter melts away to a first green, bursting bud, we will start to coax our woods to life. Native species, wildlife habitats, the flutter and hum of beneficial insects, wildflower drifts of white, blue and violet. The sun piercing the dense canopy after a half century of darkness.

For now, there is only snow on leafless branches, a long winter, a cold I have felt in my bones. And I am an old fool about to do a foolish thing. When he puts the book aside, I take the jeweller’s box from my pocket and give it to him. 

“Make of it what you will,” I tell him and he falls abruptly silent.

He takes the ring from the box and is still for a long time as he looks at the plain gold band. 

The clean revealed an engraving. It has two entwined letters, so faded and ornate they seem an encryption. The jeweller peering through a glass saw ‘S’ and ‘I’. She must be right, but when I look I am only able to discern ‘R’ embracing ‘J’. He slips the ring on to the fourth finger of his left hand. I know better than to expect words.

**~**

DI Smith’s daughter has reprinted a rare photograph of Sidney and Ivor from the 1920s. We keep it with the rest on the mantelpiece. It is of the two of them about the garden, two gents by then in their fifties, posing self-consciously in rolled up shirt sleeves and straw hats, Ivor with a spade, Sidney with a pipe. They stand against our familiar backdrop of hills and fields, the summer colours and hazy heat almost discernible beneath the monochrome.

When DI Smith was a lad, the family narrative for Sidney and Ivor had them landlord and tenant. Now that they and all who knew them are gone, who is to say otherwise?

Except, there is the ring, which we make of what we will. And there is the house, which bears witness, waking from its decades of sleep, seeming to say, ‘I know how this goes’. 

For myself, I know little. I know nothing but James’ lips, his hands, the banked fire of his body, his voice which has volumes of poetry at its command but whispers over again, only my name.

**~**

We are in one of the attic rooms, which will be his sister’s and we have just put her bed together. Or James has, while Monty critiqued and I offered a third hand where necessary. 

From this bed, where we now lie, we can see over our treetops, our snow-capped mountain range. Among the oak and beech, we have greengage, damson, pears and apples, not to mention different kinds of wildly rambling berries.

“Any thoughts on this year’s harvest?” I ask. 

“Maybe we could make jam,” he murmurs, soft and sleepy against my shoulder. “And sell it at the farmers’ market.”

“Constable’s House jam.” I suggest. 

“Inspector’s Special Blackberry and Apple,” he says. “PC Plum Preserve. I know, Strawberry Sergeant.”

“He is, at that. Is this instead of catching villains?” 

He glances up, caught out in a daydream, “If you like.”

Only ever tenuously connected to his career, he might easily skip an Inspector’s course for a jam making one. 

“I don’t think preserves will keep you in guitar strings.”

“Maybe we could whittle. Half our trees have fallen down anyway. I see us as potential whittlers.”

“Is that what you’ve got in mind for me?” I ask him. “Retirement, a nice hobby. Keep me out of trouble.”

I sound defensive; it has occurred to me he now has a say in my life. Although I suppose this has been true for a long time.

“Is that what you’ve been raging about?” He presses closer, the length of his body against mine. “I know you need to work.” 

“I reckon I’ve got a bit of life left in me.”

“You have, I noticed that.” 

“But I gave you a scare. I’m sorry.”

He stretches a cautious arm across me, closing his eyes, “You’re Robbie Lewis, you don’t have anything to prove.” 

I take his hand, which has found mine, and kiss its palm.

“Let’s just stay,” he murmurs. “Keep chickens and grow carrots and be lost. Let’s just stay and be lost here together.”

A bruised rib, which he touches momentarily at its tender point, echoes the damage he always does to my heart. He drifts and dozes in my arms until the night is lit again by more bright, white blossoms.

 

End

 

February 2017


End file.
